Important personalitiesBack

Akira Suzuki (鈴木 章 Suzuki Akira, born September 12, 1930) is a Japanese chemist and Nobel Prize Laureate (2010), who first published the Suzuki reaction, the organic reaction of an aryl- or vinyl-boronic acid with an aryl- or vinyl-halide catalyzed by a palladium(0) complex, in 1979.


Life

Suzuki was born on September 12, 1930 in Mukawa, Hokkaidō. He studied at Hokkaido University and after receiving his PhD he worked there as assistant professor. From 1963 until 1965, Suzuki worked as a postdoc with Herbert Charles Brown at Purdue University and after returning to the University of Hokkaidō he became a full professor there. With his retirement from the University of Hokkaidō in 1994 he took several positions in other Universities: 1994–1995 Okayama University of Science and 1995–2002 Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2010 together with Richard F. Heck and Ei-ichi Negishi.


Awards

- 1986 Weissberger-Williams lectureship Award
- 1987 Korean Chemical Society Award
- 1989 Chemical Society of Japan Award
- 1995 DowElanco lectureship Award
- 2000 The H. C. Brown Lecture Award
- 2003 Japan Academy Prize
- 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
- 2010 Person of Cultural Merit, Order of Culture